Why Getting Away Leads To Getting Clearer

Life is a trip. If you don’t want to take it, it will take you.

You can also venture on your own. Most of us do this with a mental rubber band tied to our back. No matter how far we go, no matter the glory and beauty and uncanny wildness we experience, we usually want a return ticket to Home. Then, once back, we wish to roam again.

Maybe it’s time to remove the dang rubber band. Sure, it’s hard. You’ve got kids. A mortgage. Vesting in your company plan. Tuesday night bowling with friends. A library card. An address where Amazon sends you stuff. A local grocery store. A newspaper subscription. Pets. A gardening service. Some book club you joined.

Oh, yes. We don’t need to attach a rubber band to ourselves, because we’ve been attaching strands of that cable for years and years, getting dug in with ‘stuff’ and ‘things’ and ‘recurring payments.’ And the like.

When I was seven years old, my parents moved our family to Ireland. It was traumatic for me. I left a safe, secure, police patrolled little village with a post office and park and speed limit signs and a railway station and a school with bright lights and huge windows and ample games in the suburbs north of Chicago. Next I knew I was in a pre-fabricated little wooden hut in a country where kids went home for lunch, where teachers swatted students on the hand if they didn’t memorize the national anthem in Gaelic and where there was one dingy light bulb dangling from the classroom ceiling.

I played with the local butcher’s sons on weekends and they’d bring me up some narrow lane crowded with hedges and blackberry brambles and then open a rickety wooden gate to a field so they could gather and lead a few heifers back to their slaughterhouse and the big ass animals bolted and I screamed and cried while my friends thrashed the asses of these massive bovines with some canes they’d cut from the local forest and I was thoroughly bewildered by this land where roads were not rectilinear but winding and where students sang aloud as they walked (and everyone walked, everywhere, for miles and miles in the countryside) and friends had me ride on the crossbar of their bicycles without brakes as they whistled down steep roads with names like Struan Hill and Blackberry Lane.

Oh My God. Ha, that was a needed wake up call.

But, you can’t go back. Sure, I wanted to for years. I dreamed of returning to the United States and seeing my friends in the nice little town park with the merry go round and slides and drinking fountain. But I never did. I grew up in Ireland and discovered girls and learned to drink Guinness and went to school in Europe and explored little alleys of Bologna and Pieve Ligure and after that life as I knew it as a seven year old—orderly, organized, 8.30 p.m. to bed, fast food drive throughs and multiple television channels—was a long way gone.

I have a home now. Well, put it this way—if I absolutely had to leave in 12 hours I could do so. Goodbye books and wine and framed maps of the Cote D’Or wine regions of Burgundy. Farewell cutlery and apron and a few back issues of National Geographic. No big deal. Although I am quite content to stay.

A friend I worked with in Pakistan has spent life working overseas. After four years in Pakistan he packed up one suitcase and left. He wrote last week to say that after two years in Honduras, he packed up two suitcases to leave. Apparently he’s getting more possessive with age.

When I was in college I lived in a house where a woman named Jonell and another guy also lived. Jonell was not a student. She had a real job. She had lots of furniture. She had many plants. She arranged all of these things in the house and it it looked beautiful. One day the other guy who lived there, the owner, told us he had sold the place and we had to move out by the end of the month. Bastard! No wonder he never asked us to sign a lease. For me, not a problem. I chucked a few bags in the back of my pickup truck and camped down by Boulder Creek for a few nights and rummaged through the Daily Camera newspaper classifieds until I found some alternate place to live. For Jonell, moving all her crap to who knows where was more of a hassle. So, this I learned: The More You Have, The More You Have To Take Care Of.

That lesson has served me well.

Having less means that you are freer to roam. Here is what you may learn when you roam:

• Things you never expected. I once crossed the border from El Paso to Juarez and took a train to Mexico City. But first I wandered, wearing a backpack. I went to a market and people were selling fruit salad in plastic cups, and they had sprinkled chili powder on top. It was delicious! Have you ever put chili powder on your fruit salad? If not, then go catch some train to somewhere you’ve never been and learn about the local food on the way. Recently, a winery owner showed me how to pour Prosecco into risotto. Wonderful! Or a friend in New Mexico taught me to coat pancakes with peanut butter before pouring syrup on top. Splendid! And, after decades of ‘killing spaghetti’ by cutting it up with a knife and fork before eating, my friend Elena in Switzerland recently taught me how to eat it with only a fork. No spoon or knife. Finally!

• How to adjust your sense of time. As an American, I was raised to eat dinner at 6.00 p.m. In France we eat dinner at 7.30 p.m. I once visited Chile, where arriving at a restaurant before 9.00 p.m. was laughable. Once my friend Dyna in Panama brought me to her friend’s house to begin cooking tamales after midnight on New Years, because that’s was what everyone did. Cool.
• Hospitality glues us together. As a volunteer in Malawi in Africa years ago, I could never visit a house without being treated to a feast. Sure, the house had no electricity or running water and was built of mud and the owners couldn’t afford shoes, but by god they were going to stuff my stomach full of chicken (‘nkuku’ in the Chichewa language) and nsima (gluey, boiled, pounded maize) and ground nuts and tea. I learned that generosity is abundant even in regions with scarcity.

• Home is just a state of mind. Sometimes I’ll take a week off drinking wine and when I eventually begin again, I realize that the wine I so revered is just this artificial pleasure which is not needed. It’s an additive to life. A bonus. Sometimes an impediment. It’s like all those ‘things’ we have at home that we adore but hardly need. And which, after we let go, we may be able to wander out to a world of starlight and peaks and stories and the most generous locals laughing and joking and insisting that we try their fruit salad. With chili powder sprinkled on top. I heartily recommend you do so. It’s splendid.

Thanks for tuning in again.

My latest Forbes pieces are here and include sailing, wine, and the most gorgeous Dolomite mountains of Italy…